The original lyrics in the Japanese are as follows: Therefore I decided to translate the Japanese lyrics into English. What I said in my previous post – “ the sort of film that makes me want to really reach out and get to know the characters within it, and simply… hold them, cry with them” – this is summarised by the word 共鳴. I fell in love with this song after watching the film – I think that this one song portrays all of what the film is about and why the film is so fantastic. The second part of the title, 空虚な石 (kuu-kyo na ishi) translates to “A Hollow Stone”. Needless to say, 共鳴 is compassion in the sense of soucit, wspólczucie, Mitgefühl, and medkänsla. To avoid confusion, I will use the word “co-feeling” instead of “sympathy” or “compassion” in my translation below. pp.19~20, published in 1999 by Faber and Faber Limited. (from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, wspólczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion – joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. In languages that form the word ‘compassion’ not from the root ‘suffering’ but from the root ‘feeling’, the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. That is why the word ‘compassion’ generally inspires suspicion it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. The following passage from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being describes this crucial difference between “sympathy” and “co-feeling” exceptionally well: The word “sympathy” evokes images of despair and the need for consolation – 共鳴 is not limited to something like this, and is used to mean “to harbour feelings of understanding and appreciation towards another person’s thoughts or actions”. The actual music is sung by a very talented singer who goes by the stage name Salyu.) The word 共鳴 (KYOH-mei) in the title translates in the dictionary to “sympathy” or “compassion” – however, as a native speaker of Japanese, I think both “sympathy” and “compassion” are off… it is more like “co-feeling”. (The film is available with English subtitles I believe, but the novel is only available as of now in Japanese. This is a song titled “共鳴（空虚な石）” by a fictional artist named Lily Chou-Chou, featured in the novel/film “ All About Lily Chou-Chou （リリイ・シュシュのすべて）“.
0 kommentar(er)
